Step #4 – Tracking Results With Google Analytics

For A/B testing we use Google Analytics. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s free and gets the job done (here‘s a great video guide on how to set it up).

Step 1

Head over to Google Analytics and select your domain.

Step 2

It will take some time before you find the right content recipe that works so content optimization should be carried out every ~1-2 months.

With that in mind the data should be monitored regularly at the end of each month.

Step 3

To monitor only the organic traffic head over to Acquisition (1) > All Traffic (2) >Channels (3) > Organic Search (4).

Then click on the Landing Pages (1)

And you will be able to see all your website’s content. Find the post you optimised and click on it.

Google Analytics compares the traffic & different metrics for each month so you know the effect of your actions and what to improve the next month.

At the end of the day, content optimization is a game of A/B testing – test, see what works and optimise.

Discovering what works is also the hardest part and requires the most work.

Wrapping It Up

By following this framework, you can make sure that your content performs better as time goes by.

For us, it was an amazing discovery. As with many other blogs out there, our posts enjoyed a couple of good months of traffic and then started slowly losing attention.

Well, not anymore – now we keep our posts fresh each month and traffic is growing faster than ever before.

I hope this guide can help you to do the same.

If you are struggling, make sure to share your issues or concerns in the comments section below. I will do my best to help you out.

And finally, here are a few questions to harness our collective wisdom: How have you previously dealt with the loss of traffic? Do you have a content optimization strategy in your organisation and how is it different from this one?